of other ants or caterpillars from those plants and to reduce resource competition for their host. Tetraponera species only leave their myrmecophyte to start a new colony on a different host; a queen and a number of workers leave the old host plant to allow the colony to continue to expand. Lifecycle and castes Tetraponera, like most ants, has one or a few queens that are the only females to reproduce in a colony. The sterile workers are all females that forage for food and defend the colony. Males are produced only during certain times of the year and disperse to mate with virgins queens from other colonies. Since ants are haplodiploid, they can control what sex their offspring will be; an unfertilised egg will become a male, while a fertilised egg will be female. This reliably restricts the production of male alates to the species' mating season, when the winged virgin queens and males fly from their home colonies to mate and start new colonies. The eggs produced by the queen hatch into larvae which are cared for inside the colony, protected from any predators by the workers. The amount of care each female larva receives determines its fate as a worker or a new queen; all males are drones. When a new colony is formed, eggs are initially produced at a low rate, but this quickly increases in the second to fourth years, to ensure enough workers are produced to protect and provide for the growing colony. Species T. aethiops Smith, 1877 T. aitkenii (Forel, 1902) T. allaborans (Walker, 1859) T. amargina Xu & Chai, 2004 T. ambigua (Emery, 1895) T. andrei (Mayr, 1895) T. anthracina (Santschi, 1910) T. apiculata Ward, 2001 T. atra Donisthorpe, 1949 T. attenuata Smith, 1877 T. avia Ward, 2001 T. bifoveolata (Mayr, 1895) T. binghami (Forel, 1902) T. bita Ward, 2001 T. brevis Ward, 2001 T. buops Ward, 2001 T. caffra (Santschi, 1914) T. clypeata (Emery, 1886) T. concava Xu & Chai, 2004 T. conica Ward, 2001 T. connectens Ward, 2001 T. continua (Forel, 1907) T. convexa Xu & Chai, 2004 T. cortina Ward, 2022 T. crassiuscula (Emery, 1900) T. diana (Santschi, 1911) T. difficilis (Emery, 1900) T. dispar Ward, 2022 T. elegans Ward, 2022 T. emeryi (Forel, 1911) T. erythraea (Emery, 1895) †T. europaea Dlussky, 2009 T. exactor Ward, 2022 T. exasciata (Forel, 1892) T. extenuata Ward, 2001 T. fictrix (Forel, 1897)